PROTEAN MAN
19
There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on
men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget chil–
dren, nothing better;
to have'
them, what iniquity! Had my father
lived, he would have lain on me at full length and would have
crushed me.... Amidst Aeneas and his fellows who carry their
An–
chises on their backs, I move from shore to shore, alone and hating
those invisible begetters who bestraddle their sons all their life long.
I left behind me a young man who did not have time to be my
father and who could now be my son. Was it a good thing or bad?
I don't know. But I readily subscribed to the verdict of an eminent
psychoanalyst: I have no Superego.
We note Sartre's image of interchangeability of father and son, of
"a young man who did not have time to be my father and who could
now be my son" - which, in a literal sense refers to the age at
which
his
father died, but symbolically suggests an extension of the
protean style to intimate family relationships. And such reversals
indeed become necessary in a rapidly changing world in which the
sons must constantly "carry their fathers on their backs," teach them
new things which they, as older people, cannot possibly know. The
judgment of the absent superego, however, may be misleading, espe–
cially if we equate superego with susceptibility to
guilt.
What has
actually disappeared - in Sartre and in protean man in general- is
the
classic
superego, the internalization of clearly defined criteria of
right and wrong transmitted within a particular culture by parents to
their children. Protean man requires freedom from precisely that
kind of superego - he requires a symbolic fatherlessness - in order
to carry out his explorations. But rather than being free of guilt, we
shall see that his guilt takes on a different form from that of his
predecessors.
There are many other representations of protean man among
contemporary novelists: in the constant internal and external motion
of "beat generation" writings, such as Jack Kerouac's
On the Road;
in the novels of a gifted successor to that generation,
J.
P. Donleavy,
particularly
The Ginger Man;
and of course in the work of European
novelists such as Gunter Grass, whose
The Tin Drum
is a breathtaking
evocation of prewar Polish-German, wartime German and postwar
German environments, in which the protagonist combines protean
adaptability with a kind of perpetual physical-mental "strike" against
any change at all.
In the visual arts, one of the most important postwar move-
